Top 500 Joseph Conrad Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “Government in general, any government anywhere, is a thing of exquisite comicality to a discerning mind.”

— Joseph Conrad

302. “The use of reason is to justify the obscure desires that move our conduct, impulses, passions, prejudices and follies, and also our fears.”

— Joseph Conrad

303. “Nowhere else than upon the sea do the days, weeks, and months fall away quicker into the past. They seem to be left astern as easily as the light air-bubbles in the swirls of the ship’s wake.”

— Joseph Conrad

304. “Nobody, nobody is good enough.”

— Joseph Conrad

305. “Here’s the main page of motivational quotes, if you want a different topic. Gossip is what no one claims to like, but everybody enjoys.”

— Joseph Conrad

306. “Truth of a modest sort I can promise you, and also sincerity. That complete, praiseworthy sincerity which, while it delivers one into the hands of one’s enemies, is as likely as not to embroil one with one’s friends.”

— Joseph Conrad

307. “The priests talk of consecrated ground! Bah! All the earth made by God is holy; but the sea, which knows nothing of kings and priests and tyrants, is the holiest of all.”

— Joseph Conrad

308. “I said; ‘his example too. Yes, his example. I forgot that.’ “‘But I do not. I cannot – I.”

— Joseph Conrad

309. “You perceive the force of a word. He who wants to persuade should put his trust not in the right argument, but in the right word. The power of sound has always been greater than the power of sense... Give me the right word and the right accent and I will move the world.”

— Joseph Conrad

310. “You can’t, in sound morals, condemn a man for taking care of his own integrity. It is his clear duty.”

— Joseph Conrad

311. “One rule holds good of most young men – whether rich or poor. They never have money for the necessaries of life, but they have always money to spare for their caprices – an anomaly which finds its explanation in their youth and in the almost frantic eagerness with which youth grasps at pleasure.”

— Joseph Conrad

312. “As in political so in literary action a man wins friends for himself mostly by the passion of his prejudices and the consistent narrowness of his outlook.”

— Joseph Conrad

313. “To a teacher of languages there comes a time when the world is but a place of many words and man appears a mere talking animal not much more wonderful than a parrot.”

— Joseph Conrad

314. “The artist in his calling of interpreter creates because he must. He is so much of a voice that, for him, silence is like death.”

— Joseph Conrad

315. “I suppose everybody must be always just a little homesick.”

— Joseph Conrad

316. “Books may be written in all sorts of places. Verbal inspiration may enter the berth of a mariner on board a ship frozen fast in a river in the middle of a town.”

— Joseph Conrad

317. “The simple old sailor, with his talk of chains and purchases, made me forget the jungle and the pilgrims in a delicious sensation of having come upon something unmistakably real. Such a book being there was wonderful enough; but still more astounding were the notes penciled in the margin, and plainly referring to the text. I couldn’t believe my eyes! They were in cipher! Yes, it looked like cipher.”

— Joseph Conrad

318. “Let a fool be made serviceable according to his folly.”

— Joseph Conrad

319. “I am stupid, am I not? What more can I want? If you ask them who is brave – who is true – who is just – who is it they would trust with their lives? – they would say, Tuan Jim. And yet they can never know the real, real truth...”

— Joseph Conrad

320. “All this happened in much less time than it takes to tell, since I am trying to interpret for you into slow speech the instantaneous effect of visual impressions.”

— Joseph Conrad

321. “He stooped over her, and her raised arms fell upon his shoulders. He lifted her up, steadied himself and began to walk, looking straight before him. “What are you doing?” she asked, feebly. “I am escaping from my enemies,” he said, never once glancing at his light burden. “With me?” she sighed, helplessly. “Never without you,” he said. “You are my strength.”

— Joseph Conrad

322. “The revolutionary spirit is mighty convenient in this, that it frees one from all scruples as regards ideas.”

— Joseph Conrad

323. “I remained, and went on with my dinner. I believe I was considered brutally callous. However, I did not eat much.”

— Joseph Conrad

324. “You fellows know there are those voyages that seem ordered for the illustration of life, that might stand for a symbol of existence. You fight, work, sweat, nearly kill yourself, sometimes do kill yourself, trying to accomplish something – and you can’t. Not from any fault of yours. You simply can do nothing, neither great nor little – not a thing in the world – not even marry an old maid, or get a wretched 600-ton cargo of coal to its port of destination.”

— Joseph Conrad

325. “The mind of man is capable of anything-because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future. What was there after all? Joy, fear, sorrow, devotion, valour, rage-who can tell?-but truth-truth stripped of its cloak of time. Let the fool gape and shudder-the man know, and can look on without a wink. But he must at least be as much of a man as these on the shore. He must meet the truth with his own true stuff-with his own inborn strength.”

— Joseph Conrad

326. “She feared the unknown as we all do, and her ignorance made the unknown infinitely vast.”

— Joseph Conrad

327. “For the dead can live only with the exact intensity and quality of the life imparted to them by the living.”

— Joseph Conrad

328. “Beyond the fence the forest stood up spectrally in the moonlight, and through the dim stir, through the faint sounds of that lamentable courtyard, the silence of the land went home to one’s very heart – its mystery, its greatness, the amazing reality of its concealed life.”

— Joseph Conrad

329. “Everybody had to be thoroughly understood before being accepted.”

— Joseph Conrad

330. “There is no peace and no rest in the development of material interests. They have their law, and their justice. But it is founded on expediency, and is inhuman; it is without rectitude, without the continuity and the force that can be found only in a moral principle.”

— Joseph Conrad

331. “She was highly gifted in the art of human intercourse which consists in delicate shades of self-forgetfulness and in the suggestion of universal comprehension.”

— Joseph Conrad

332. “Kings, ministers, aristocrats, the rich in general, kept the people in poverty and subjection; they kept them as they kept dogs, to fight and hunt for their service.”

— Joseph Conrad

333. “Do you know how I would call the nature of the present economic conditions? I would call it cannibalistic. That’s what it is! They are nourishing their greed on the quivering flesh and the warm blood of the people – nothing else.”

— Joseph Conrad

334. “But about feelings people really know nothing. We talk with indignation or enthusiasm; we talk about oppression, cruelty, crime, devotion, self-sacrifice, virtue, and we know nothing real beyond these words.”

— Joseph Conrad

335. “The word “ivory” rang in the air, was whispered, was sighed. You would think they were praying to it. A taint of imbecile rapacity blew through it all, like a whiff from some corpse. By Jove! I’ve never seen anything so unreal in my life. And outside, the silent wilderness surrounding this cleared speck on the earth struck me as something great and invincible, like evil or truth, waiting patiently for the passing away of this fantastic invasion.”

— Joseph Conrad

336. “Criticism, that fine flower of personal expression in the garden of letters.”

— Joseph Conrad

337. “The fault of this country is the want of measure in political life. Flat acquiescence in illegality, followed by sanguinary reaction – that, senores, is not the way to a stable and prosperous future.”

— Joseph Conrad

338. “I have attempted to tear asunder the veil you have hung to conceal from us the pain of life, and I have been wounded by the mystery... Oedipus, half way to finding the word of the enigma, young Faust, regretting already the simple life, the life of the heart, I come back to you repentant, reconciled, O gentle deceiver!”

— Joseph Conrad

339. “Being a lady is a frightfully troublesome assignment, since it comprises mainly in managing men.”

— Joseph Conrad

340. “The sea, perhaps because of its saltiness, roughens the outside but keeps sweet the kernel of its servants’ soul.”

— Joseph Conrad

341. “To slay, to love – the greatest enterprises of life upon a man! And I have no experience of either.”

— Joseph Conrad

342. “The true Razumov had his being in the willed, in the determined future – in that future menaced by the lawlessness of autocracy – for autocracy knows no law – and the lawlessness of revolution.”

— Joseph Conrad

343. “Things and men have always a certain sense, a certain side by which they must be got hold of if one wants to obtain a solid grasp and a perfect command.”

— Joseph Conrad

344. “A modern fleet of ships does not so much make use of the sea as exploit a highway.”

— Joseph Conrad

345. “Life knows us not and we do not know life – -we don’t know even our own thoughts. Half the words we use have no meaning whatever and of the other half each man understands each word after the fashion of his own folly and conceit. Faith is a myth and beliefs shift like mists on the shore; thoughts vanish; words, once pronounced, die; and the memory of yesterday is as shadowy as the hope of tomorrow.”

— Joseph Conrad

346. “Yet, when one thinks of it, diplomacy without force is a but a rotten reed to lean upon.”

— Joseph Conrad

347. “Had he been informed by an indisputable authority that the end of the world was to be finally accomplished by a catastrophic disturbance of the atmosphere, he would have assimilated the information under the simple idea of dirty weather, and no other, because he had no experience of cataclysms, and belief does not necessarily imply comprehension.”

— Joseph Conrad

348. “One must not make too much of anything in life, good or bad.”

— Joseph Conrad

349. “For a moment I had a view of a world that seemed to wear a vast and dismal aspect of disorder, while, in truth, thanks to our unwearied efforts, it is as sunny an arrangement of small conveniences as the mind of man can conceive.”

— Joseph Conrad

350. “It was rather like a forced-on numbness of spirit. The long, long stress of a gale does it; the suspense of the interminably culminating catastrophe; and there is a bodily fatigue in the mere holding on to existence within the excessive tumult; a searching and insidious fatigue that penetrates deep into a man’s breast to cast down and sadden his heart, which is incorrigible, and of all the gifts of the earth – even before life itself – aspires to peace.”

— Joseph Conrad